After missing the boat in the internet land grab for MySpace and YouTube, and supposedly balking at Facebook's asking price, Yahoo! is now reportedly courting AOL.
Yahoo! is remaining tight-lipped on exactly what is, or isn't, going on - however, the web giant has been here before.
Last year Google dived in front of Yahoo! to become AOL's exclusive internet search provider, buying a 5% stake for $1bn.
According to a Fortune.com report posted on the CNN Money website Yahoo! has a couple of options and doing nothing is not one of them.
Yahoo! has made some good acquisitions in the past - Flickr and del.icio.us for example - and has been forging ahead with its vision of 'social search'.
So why the negativity, it is after all the home of the largest global user base?
Issues include delays in launching its search-advertising system - called Panama - its stock price is well down and its most recent third quarter profits nose-dived by 38% year on year.
The sum of the parts, according to one blogger, is that Yahoo! is no longer cool and supple like some of the web 2.0 internet darlings out there now.
The options on the table: buy AOL from Time Warner; sell to the deep-pocketed Microsoft - remember Yahoo! is the number two search player to Google while Microsoft is lagging; merge with eBay - seen as unlikely but they already have a partnership in the US and both are concerned with Google's success.
Or, as chief executive Terry Semel 'officially' indicated, perhaps just keep on keeping on. Maybe?
